Poems about nature, queer identity, grief, love, joy, and hope.
Durham, UK.
Published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, June 2026
We ate it leaning against the rail above the harbour – black cherry, melting down the cone faster than we could catch it.
And you laughed, mouth red, sunlight flaring in your lashes.
I watched the boats move below us – slow beasts with canvas wings – and thought: this is joy.
Not fireworks, not promises, not certainty.
Just you, offering me a bite from your side of the cone.
And the sweetness – sharp and floral, ripe as August before it turns.
First collection, in progress
Built from aftermaths: grief, love, memory, survival. These poems don’t offer neat endings or easy truths. Instead they offer witness. They carry what couldn’t be said at the time, what lingered after the worst was over, and what remained when everything else fell away.
Four sections, Inheritance, Becoming, Fracture and Endurance, move through a life reduced to pieces and put back together differently. It isn’t about closure. It’s about continuance.
Second collection, in progress
This is a book about a place, and about the boy I loved there. It begins with movement: the crossing of an ocean, the ache of arrival, the sweet weight of new intimacy. The poems are rooted in British Columbia, where I spent a season of my life becoming someone I hadn’t yet met.
It isn’t a love story. Not entirely. It’s a map of emotion, and a study in how places mark us even when we leave them. Especially when we leave them. Black Cherry Ice Cream comes from here.
I’m H. J. Thomas. I live in Durham, and I write about nature, queer identity, grief, love, joy, and hope.
The poems are drawn from the real and the almost-real: depression, queerness, family, class, desire, survival. They’re how I held what I couldn’t say out loud. I offer them now not as resolution, but as presence.
Two places do most of the work. The north east of England, which is where I am. And the coast of British Columbia, where I spent a season of my life becoming someone I hadn’t yet met: forests older than my country, salt winds that remembered things I hadn’t learned yet.
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